All Serial Killers are Satanic Pawns of the CIA: David McGowan’s Programmed to Kill: The Politics of Serial Murder

There’s no such thing as serial killers. Ted Bundy, Ted Kaczynski, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, Charles Manson, David Berkowitz, Richard Ramirez and the likes were all framed by the government. None of these men committed all of the murders of which they were accused. They were all part of CIA mind control operations. Satanic ritual abuse and murderous Satanic cults exist, but they are just part of the US government’s mind control agenda.

This book starts off with a lengthy section describing different sex crimes committed against children. There really are a lot of sickos out there. The author claims that many of these crimes were committed by the US government to make their victims more susceptible to mind control. He points out that a high percentage of serial killers experienced sexual abuse as children. This was some bleak reading as proof of this. Paedophiles are truly the vilest form of life. Admittedly, I couldn’t help but giggle when a Satanic ritual abuse “victim” described how they were forced to play “poopoo baseball”

The next and longest section of the book details the crimes of America’s most notorious serial killers. McGowan includes all of the big ones with the noticeable exception of the Son of Sam. This is not because he thinks that David Berkowitz was any different to the other killers discussed but because he believes that Maury Terry said all that needed to be said about Berkowitz and his accomplices in The Ultimate Evil. This is fair; that book is exhaustive, and I’d imagine most of McGowan’s readers have probably read Terry, but the phrase “programmed to kill” actually came from one of the Son of Sam letters.

I went through a bit of a serial killer phase as a teenager, so I knew about John Wayne Gacy and Bundy, but most of my serial killer knowledge is limited to the names and lyrics of Macabre songs. I was aware that Edmund Kemper had a horrible temper and that Dahmer used to work in a chocolate factory, but although I knew that Richard Speck had done something outrageous, I didn’t know the specifics. It turns out this Speck guy killed 8 student nurses and was sentenced to life in prison. Some serial killers get murdered in prison due to their reputations, but Richard Speck managed to keep himself alive by injecting himself with estrogen and growing a pair of tits. In the late 80s, a lawyer snuck a video camera into the prison where Speck was locked up and made a video of him wearing blue satin panties, snorting cocaine and giving blowjobs to other inmates. What the heck Richard Speck?

A lot of the reasoning presented here is utterly ridiculous. The book was written in 2004, just a few years before smartphones became ubiquitous, and the writing here makes that obvious. Whenever I would read about a killer I hadn’t encountered before, I would check their wikipedia page, and in most cases that would make it very obvious how hard the author was trying to put his slant on things. I’d like to assume that a person wouldn’t get away with this kind of distortion of the truth anymore, but unfortunately it seems that more people are buying into this type of shit than ever before. This kind of thinking is a direct precursor to the Pizzagate conspiracy and that kind of nonsense. As soon as you point out how the research is flawed, believers will accuse you of having being duped by the same system that created these “satanic” killers. Some of this book is verifiable fiction too. When discussing Aleister Crowley, the author discusses the story about Crowley performing a ritual that killed his friend and drove him crazy… the one that Dennis Wheatley made up. McGowan also assumes the existence of the Hand of Death, a Satanic cult of assassins that existed only in the mind of Henry Lee Lucas (more on that in matter in a couple of weeks),

The book’s central premise is total madness anyways. The message is that serial killers are made, not born. I get the appeal of that idea. It’s hard for me to accept the fact that some men enjoy murdering children, but it wouldn’t make me feel much better if I found out that it was actually the government putting those sick desires into its citizens’ heads. Also, the notion that the American government is organised enough to do stuff like this is ridiculous.

Programmed to Kill really only covers American killers. I assume other countries do have serial killers, but I can only think of a few. It does seem a bit odd that America has so many. I read an article that claims that the amount of serial killers has been dropping in the last few decades. The CIA must be devoting their attention elsewhere.

This is a ridiculous book. It could only be convincing to a person with no way of verifying the claims made within. I mainly read it because I knew it mentioned the 4 Pi cult, but it didn’t contain anything about that mysterious group that I haven’t encountered elsewhere. It did put me onto a few other books about Satanic killers. It also forced me to spend a lot of time thinking about how horrible human beings are, and I started getting nervous leaving my house.